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Sunday, 4 January 2015

We're A Community Of Hate...

In 2014 I noticed a worrying trend on GLBT blogs and in the comments sections of blogs.

We've become a community of hate.

We are already a community divided, with none of the unity that I celebrated when I came out in 1990. We have become a racist and body-fascist group that is willing to pounce on and consume it's own like a wounded Piranha would be by it's shoal.

It is so sad.

The word "Community" is a contraction of "Common Unity". It's supposed to mean a group of people who are united by commonalities, usually commonalities of purpose or identity. Given how many elements of society out there STILL have HUGE truck loads of vitriolic hate for us, I am stunned at how we are actually now our own worse enemy.

We poz bash.
We race bash.
We fat bash.
We age bash.
Young gay men verbally bash others because they aren't as "good as they should be / as fit as they should be / et al".
And we trans bash.
We are in essence, gay bashers.

By bashing I mean verbally abusing btw.

In 1990 in Queensland it was illegal for me to be homosexual. If caught engaging in homosexual behaviour - in a public place or in the privacy of my own bedroom - I could have been arrested and jailed. I attended rallies. In 1992 I became a volunteer at the Queensland AIDS Council. At the time that I joined the staff was composed of people of all genders, diverse age range up to early 60's, diverse racial profile and sexuality profile. We were all there because HIV was raging through our community and claiming so many people. We were united by the single fact that we wanted people to live.

It wasn't a perfect community. There were still issues within. But it was BETTER THAN NOW.

We are a community no longer.

In Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Australia, UK, America to name a few - we have failed. Those who came before us and those who have sadly left us must feel such a sense of disappointment and loss.

We have had wins. And these wins are producing the inverse effect of what it should.

I am leaving this post here. I am more keen to hear what YOU think about this.

During the early 1990s every gay man seemed to know someone who was HIV+ or had AIDS. I watched as friends wasted away, rallied over and over, and eventually died. Those of us who experienced that at the time knew that to be gay meant to face death. It was unavoidable. Our grief and fear and anger at authorities who did not care brought us together. Some of us found a holy sense of connection, a faith in being LGBT. I agree with you. We have gone back to the bitchiness, cruelty and self-loathing in "The Boys in the Band". When we attack each other we really attack our inner selves.

I think not needing to hide who we are, winning civil rights has caused a sea change. We are a community in flux and while the horror years of the rampage of AIDS did draw different LGBT folks together, it more or less papered over out massive differences.

And now that we are slowly winning the right to exist openly in many countries, that causes our community to wither and shrink. The Jewish people have said that the USA is both the best thing and the worst thing that has ever happened. Why the worst? Because without being socially unacceptable, without having many civil rights, it causes a very tight knit community to band together into us against them.

So, now we need to see how we can manage to hold together anything even close to a community without the outside pressures of being a social outcast. Or do we? Maybe its time to being to fully integrate ourselves into society as a whole.